Performing risk and the project: Risk maps as mediating instruments

Has Management Accounting Research been critical?

“…Similar observations are found elsewhere. For example, Swedish bank managers dealing with operations, and managing risk and meeting regulatory demands respectively held different logics of calculation and beliefs about incorporating risk into management controls, and each group accepted information and evaluated changes accordingly (Wahlström, 2009); definitions of risk management from the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission when practiced oscillated between information technology-based representations and social interpretations resulting in no common understanding of corporate affairs, and rather than improving performance or compliance risk measures they spawned a quest for accountability which created space for new and broader forms of knowledge than found in more coherent and homogenous accounting systems (Tekathen and Dechow, 2013); risk maps in the Norwegian petroleum industry did not provide early warning signals or defensive audit trails but became mediating instruments enabling scattered employees to reconcile their interests, and gain confidence in and associate with the project (Jordan et al, 2013). Power is also an issue.…”

How do risk managers become influential? A field study of toolmaking in two financial institutions

“…For example, Qu and Cooper (2011) examine the process of inscription building for a balanced scorecard, and show how interactions between consultants and clients affect the shape of this accounting tool. Relatedly, redeploying the concept of accounting inscriptions as well as that of mediation, Jordan et al (2013) showed how the graphical representations of risk maps acted as a mediating instrument that helped multiple parties working on a joint project in the Norwegian petroleum industry to communicate and to build confidence in their project and its progress. The management literature further examines the interrelations between tools, experts, and managers, and focuses empirically on how tools such as "common models, maps, and devices that demonstrate systemic approaches to cross-functional issues" enable and frame communication among organizational stakeholders (: 24).…”

“…We do not see this in Anglo Bank, as the tools of the new guard were not readily communicable-they were too abstract, technical and unfamiliar to the business lines (cf., Bechky, 2003b). It has to be noted, though, that the area of comparison is partial, because the primary audience of Anglo Bank's new guard risk managers were the regulators, and, beyond compliance discussions at internal governance forums, the new guard had limited opportunities to develop authoritative inscriptions (Jordan et al, 2013) to build relations with other control processes such as planning or performance measurement. It may be, then, that they did not develop communicative tools in part because they had little incentive or limited opportunities to do so.…”

“…Field study evidence indeed highlights that risk managers in banks develop a variety of such tools and deploy them in different ways (Mikes, 2009(Mikes, , 2011Arena et al, 2010). Jordan et al (2013) recently provided a detailed empirical account of how, in a non-financial setting, a specific risk management tool, the risk map, was central to the management of a prolonged and multifaceted project by facilitating the creation and communication of different representations of the project. Surveys also document the rising visibility of quantitative tools-based techniques such as economic capital calculations and stress testing (Deloitte, 2011;KPMG, 2011;PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2012), which are deployed in communication between risk managers and different stakeholders.…”

Generating project risk response strategies based on CBR: A case study

“…In the existing studies, the methods for generating project risk response strategies can be mainly classified into four types (Zhang & Fan, 2014): the zonal-based method (Elkjaer & Felding, 1999;Flanagan & Norman, 1993;Jordan, Jørgensen, & Mitterhofer, 2013;Marcelino-Sádaba, Pérez-Ezcurdia, Echeverría Lazcano, & Villanueva, 2014;Miller & Lessard, 2001;Piney, 2002;Sumit, 2001), the trade-off method (Chapman & Ward, 1996;Kujawski, 2002;Pipattanapiwong & Watanabe, 2000), the work breakdown structure (WBS)-based method (Chapman, 1979;Klein, Powell, & Chapman, 1994;Seyedhoseini, Noori, & Hatefi, 2009) and the optimization-model method (Ben-David & Raz, 2001;Fan et al, 2008;Hu, Zhang, Ngai, Cai, & Liu, 2013;Kayis, Arndt, Zhou, & Amornsawadwatana, 2007). The detailed elaborations of the above four types of methods can been seen from Zhang and Fan (2014).…”